Altmetric Blog

August High Five – Face(book) the facts

Josh Clark, 7th September 2018

Welcome to the August High Five! On a monthly basis, the High Five post highlights the articles that have received the most attention from a particular attention source type – whether it’s blogs, policy documents, Twitter, Wikipedia, or something else!

This month we’ll be focusing on the pieces published in July that have been mentioned in posts on public Facebook pages.

#1 The world is your oyster!

Credit: Adapted from Getty

Our first article this month is actually a careers piece, ‘Why it is not a ‘failure’ to leave academia’, published in Nature. The article discusses how PhD students can prepare and make informed decisions about career paths outside of academia:

This article received a huge response online – including an amazing 65 public Facebook page posts from 60 users. Many of the posts were academics and organizations recommending the article to their followers:

‘We found that the risk of all-cause mortality, and of cancers specifically, rises with increasing levels of consumption, and the level of consumption that minimises health loss is zero.’ Max G Griswold et al.

The article has received 49 wall posts from 46 users keen to promote the findings of the study:

‘With equal amounts of Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA, the specimen seemed to have one parent from each hominin group. But there was another possibility: Denny’s parents could have belonged to a population of Denisovan–Neanderthal hybrids.’Matthew Warren

49 public wall posts from 46 users mentioned the article, with many excited to share the news:

#5 Time for change

Credit: qimono under CC0

The fifth most mentioned paper is ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’ published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The paper proposes that the Earth may be approaching a planetary threshold that could result in much hotter climates, unless there is a change in the relationship between humanity and the ‘Earth system’.

‘The impacts of a Hothouse Earth pathway on human societies would likely be massive, sometimes abrupt, and undoubtedly disruptive.’ Will Stefan et al.

The paper attracted mentions in 30 wall posts from 28 users; many of whom were warning their followers of the disastrous finding of the paper: